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> Processors have barely became faster in the last couple of years. Funny you should mention that. I will be picking up one of the new MacBook Airs and when mu
by martingordon 14y ago
> Processors have barely became faster in the last couple of years.
Funny you should mention that. I will be picking up one of the new MacBook Airs and when mulling over the 1.8 vs 2.0 GHz processors, I realized that my last three notebooks (including the new Air) have each had successively lower clock speeds while posting faster Geekbench scores.
2008 - Aluminum MacBook 2.4 GHz - 3374
2010 - MacBook Air 2.13 GHz - 3475
2012 - MacBook Air 1.8 GHz - 6398
- Evbn 14y agoThat's because the boards are getting more cycles in GPU and cache and things, which are more important than straightahead serial speed.
- bnegreve 14y agoIt's also because the power consumption is quadratic with the frequency. This is important if you agree that an additional hour on battery is worth much more than few cylces per sec.
- gcb 14y agoThat's why your cpu runs on different paths to save power when not needed. Using a lower cpu is just lazy and cheap.
- Dave_Rosenthal 14y agoNo, the first-order model is that power consumption is quadratic with voltage, and linear with frequency.
- bnegreve 14y agoOk, but isn’t increasing the voltage required to keep the transistors stable as you increase the frequency ?
- Karunamon 14y agoThat's kind of irrelevant anyways, all modern CPU's have speed stepping functionality that can reduce the clock speed while on battery.
- martingordon 14y agoYes, I'm well aware of the reasons why my computers get faster even at lower clock speeds. I think of the megahertz myth, I picture clock speeds staying the same and getting more done at those clock speeds (e.g., all my computers would forever be pegged at 2 GHz but would continue to get faster). It was only today that I realized that clock speeds (at least in my case) are going down (rather than staying constant) while computation ability and battery life continue to increase.
- CountSessine 14y agoAgreed, but I think the point is that while the growth curve may indeed be 'bending down', for non-upgradeable components like cache memory, memory controllers, GPUs, AND CPUs, the growth curve certainly hasn't leveled out.
- blazingice 14y agoDon't forget about "Turbo Boost" - that "1.8 GHz" runs at 2.8 GHz when you're only using one of two cores. Combined with a more efficient architecture, this helps explain the performance gains.